The following article from
educationnews.org covers some of the
myths that education and legislative bureaucracies use to urge the creation of
state-sponsored daycare/education programs. Usually the programs cite much
"evidence" from multitudes of "experts" for the need to get very young children
in school as early as possible. However, that evidence is not based on
sound scientific research, and "Early-Years Learning Myth" documents some of
junk science that surrounds the subject of early childhood education.

PERSPECTIVE EARLY-YEARS LEARNING MYTH by JANN FLURY

November 19, 2001

Every rational member of society can agree that a stable, normal family life
provides the optimum conditions for a child's early emotional and intellectual
development. And everyone can accept that learning is a natural process that
seems to come easiest to the young. However, to translate that axiom into a
requirement for state-run "professionally-staffed early-childhood learning
centers," into which children must be placed-literally from birth- in order for
them to reach their full potential, is a distortion of reality. It is a fad that
a certain school of "experts" is promoting, much to the delight of social
services and the education establishments, because the initiative creates lots
of new jobs, and educators find it most convenient to teach groups of children
with uniformly molded personalities.

The concept is readily embraced by educators; they have long used the
excuse that children come to them with different levels of knowledge, many, ill
prepared for school, not knowing how to read or print. Educators insist that
this great discrepancy in basic knowledge represents an insurmountable gap for
teachers to achieve any kind of standard learning results by the end of the
school year-even in grade one.

According to proponents of early-childhood learning, a child's brain must
be nurtured and appropriately stimulated-not by unqualified parents, but by
trained experts-during the optimum period of brain development between the age
of one to six, or the child will never reach its full intellectual potential.
According to that hypothesis, all past generations must have missed the boat.

The concept is mostly based on opinion rather than sound scientific fact.
It has been challenged by reputable research scientists, and it flies in the
face of decades of empirical evidence. With the development of PET scans
(Positron Emission Tomography) these avant garde "scientists" boast they can
observe the brain from the "womb to the tomb." Their "research" claims to have
shown conclusively that certain neural pathways in the brain will not get
connected and will shut down, probably forever, unless they are appropriately
stimulated. This "research" has inspired national programs such as "Success by
Six" in the United States and "Early Childhood Development Centers" in Canada,
the goals of which are to put children from infancy to age 5 into special
daycare centers run by professionally trained staff, so all 6-year-olds will be
uniformly school ready.

The Myth of the First Three Years, a book by John T. Bruer,
published in the late 1990's, debunks most of the hypothesis and suggests that
such early-learning initiatives are a waste of taxpayer dollars. His book has
received the support of reputable scientists such as the director of the Center
for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who
labeled the book as "a voice of sanity, common sense and genuine expertise to
counter the latest fad from the witch doctors of child development." And Howard
Gardner, a professor at Harvard, said the book "convincingly debunks current
hype about brain research and learning [and] should shame those who propose
grandiose policies or issue dire warnings on the basis of scanty or ambiguous
evidence." The advent of PET scanning presented an opportunity for certain
so-called "research scientists" to watch an infant's brain develop-or not
develop. They jumped to conclusions and published their papers on brain
development without regard for proven procedures or adequate scientific
evidence. It's rather reminiscent of earlier years, when mass spectrometry
became a practical scientific tool for analyzing the composition of matter. The
would-be-scientists determined that tuna was no longer safe to eat because it
contained unacceptably high levels of mercury as a result of industrial
pollutants dumped into the oceans. Serious health warnings were issued, and the
tuna fishery plunged into crisis. Industry was ordered to clean up their dumping
act and the environmentalists had their day.

Two or three years later, lo-and-behold tuna was back on the menu,
apparently safe to eat. Nothing in the oceans, the tuna, nor the dumping habits
of industry had changed over the short period, of course, but the "scientists"
decided the levels of mercury generally detected in tuna by mass spectrometry
could be easily tolerated by the human body. Similarly, scientists can watch the
brain grow by using PET scanning techniques but they don't quite know what they
are watching. As Bruer so aptly put it, "The myth of the first three years can
serve as an interesting case study for how science is used and abused in policy
debates."

Plenty of empirical evidence exists that disproves the wild hypothesis of
early brain development. All past generations managed to do fine, despite a
dearth of "professional" early-childhood brain stimulus. Programs such as No
Excuses in the U. S. have shown conclusively that underprivileged,
"under-stimulated" children from poor neighborhoods can learn as well as anyone
when they are taught diligently by teacher-centered direct instruction methods.
And some countries, producing superior results to North America-Switzerland for
one-don't start children in grade one until they are in their seventh year.
Remediation classes is another case-in-point. Most of the students relegated to
remediation classes, even in the later grades, learn very well when taught
effectively.

Government run early daycare is not new. All communist and socialist
states have tried it in the past. And Nazi Germany had its Hitler Youth. It's a
blatant maneuver to undermine the nuclear family and seize control of our
children from birth (make it the human capital of the state), so the
establishment can mold their little minds into uniform, politically-correct
thinking entities. In reality, such institutions will raise a nation of
apathetic, detached, little socialists without conscience, moral values or
integrity, ready to betray their parents to the "Thought Police." These
"fortunate" children will be then considered truly school ready, able to reach
their full potential.

We do not need "Success by Six" programs or "Early Childhood Development
Centers" we need better teaching when our children start their formal schooling,
be it kindergarten or grade one. Some parents do a lot to give their children a
head start in school, others do not, or cannot. It is the responsibility of the
teacher and school to ensure that all children follow a proper code of
discipline while at school and that they learn what is needed to succeed in the
workplace or to go on to higher learning.

Instead of new fad projects, the "experts" would be wise to rework
existing frill curriculums into something more useful and concentrate on the
existing, effective teaching methods for grade-school-aged children. Let the
establishment encourage and support the nuclear family, and leave the nurturing
to the mothers and the fathers.